GitHub

An agent that opens pull requests, reads issues, or pushes branches needs a GitHub credential of its own. Without one it borrows whatever login happens to be on the machine, and in a container there's nothing to borrow.

bishop github setup

It takes the token from the gh CLI, offering to run gh auth login if you aren't logged in, verifies it against GitHub, and writes GH_TOKEN to .env. From there it reaches the agent's environment, and gh picks it up on its own. GH_TOKEN is read at startup, so changing it needs a restart.

The report names the account the token acts as and the scopes it carries, and prints the gh auth refresh for any scope the agent needs that's missing. Re-running it checks the token instead of issuing another, so it doubles as a health check in a deploy script. It exits non-zero when GitHub won't accept the token.

Limiting what the agent can reach

A token from gh auth login acts as you, in every repository you can reach. To limit the agent instead, create a fine-grained personal access token scoped to the repositories it should touch, put it in .env as GH_TOKEN, and run setup to check it. GitHub reports no scopes for a fine-grained token, so setup says what it can't tell you rather than guessing. Setup never replaces a GH_TOKEN already in .env.

Pushing with git

git never reads GH_TOKEN, so git push still asks for a password until the credential helper is installed. Setup says so when it's missing:

gh auth setup-git

SSH keys cover clone and push, but API calls like gh pr create still need the token.

Keeping your own login

gh auth login replaces whichever account the gh CLI is signed in as. On a machine where you're signed in as yourself, --temporary runs the login in a gh configuration directory it creates and deletes, so your own login survives:

bishop github setup --temporary

The token still lands in .env. Because the temporary directory has no account in it, this always logs in rather than reusing one, and it needs a terminal. A GH_TOKEN already in .env is checked as usual and no login happens at all.

Secrets somewhere else

For a deployment whose secrets live somewhere other than a .env file, --print writes the credential to stdout as JSON and nothing to disk, with the report and any prompting on stderr:

$ bishop github setup --print
{"GH_TOKEN":"gho_..."}

--no-prompt never offers the login, and fails with the command to run instead. --temporary and --print combine: log in as the agent, pipe the token into a secret store, leave nothing behind.

With the sandbox on

The sandbox keeps the agent out of ~/.ssh and the gh CLI's login. bishop nono setup writes a profile that grants both, so a sandboxed agent can still push.